Monday, November 06, 2006

My link blog is stealing from other authors?

My link blog is not stealing from blog authors and neither is Scoble’s. Scoble has a post about how someone has accused him of stealing content in his Google Reader link blog and he has some strong thoughts around it that I agree with. Neither Scoble nor I are re-publishing every article that a blog author posts on his/her blog — we simply post what we like and presumably if you read my link blog and like the content from a particular author, then you subscribe to the author’s blog feed.

Further, this person accuses Scoble of “stealing RSS,” which is laughable as the whole RSS protocol was designed to make it easy to share information — it’s easy for the end user to opt-in, easy for the end user to opt-out, and easy for the author to syndicate his/her information. Perhaps RSS is referred to as “Really Simple Syndication” for a reason; if it was protocol designed to make it hard to share information, it might be called “Really Restrictive Syndication.”

Here’s the deal: if you don’t like the fact that I’m putting some of your content into my link blog, then send me an e-mail or drop a comment and I’ll remove all of your posts that currently exist in my link blog and never put one of your posts in my link blog again — it will actually be really easy for me to ensure you never are in my link blog again because I’ll probably unsubscribe from reading your blog on a daily basis. Note that like Scoble’s, my link blog is totally public and runs no advertising that I have control over; in fact, it appears that the link blog preserves the original feed advertising from the original blog from which the posts are pulled.

1 comment:

It's so nice Comcast has so much money to throw around that they can simply change their name of existing services without providing any real benefit. How long until my bill goes up again and I see a "Rebranding Fee" on it?